Stiff Penalities for Flint Residents Not Paying Water Bill

In 2005, Michigan completed the years-long process of collecting 500,000 lead blood tests from children in the state under 6. Back then, 26% of kids tested — that's more than one in four — had blood lead levels (5 micrograms per deciliter or greater) that would cause concern today. In the hardest hit parts of Flint now, only 10.6% of kids have such concerning levels of lead in their blood.

Virginia Tech University researchers first brought proof of high lead levels in Flint water to public attention last September, performing three water tests in each of the more than 250 Flint homes. Lead levels were high enough to warrant urgent government action. But in a similar problem with Washington, D.C.’s tap water a little over a decade ago, hundreds of homes were found to have stratospheric lead levels of 300 parts per billion or more. In Flint, Virginia Tech found one home with such a high lead level in the water.

So how dangerous was that water? In 2015, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services tracked one child in Flint whose initial blood test was so alarming it required hospitalization. A later, more accurate test showed a lower, but still dangerous level of lead at more than five times the CDC's level of concern. In contrast, 2005 CDC data show more than 300 people in Michigan with the same or worse confirmed test results.

But in raising the alarm about a threat throughout Flint, researchers minimized results that cast doubt on the breadth of the health problem — neglecting to emphasize that, in three of the city’s nine wards, lead tests showed a nearly 50% decline in the number of kids testing positive. In a fourth, there was no change. The study also found that the number of children with elevated blood lead levels rose even for county residents whose water supply did not change.

Michigan's health department maintains a similar database of 3,353 blood tests on children in Flint from 2015 and provided USA TODAY a preliminary analysis. Seventy-seven percent of the "positive" test results are in the lowest 5-9 micrograms per deciliter range most vulnerable to the inaccuracy of capillary tests, raising the possibility of a significant number of false positives. As one CDC analysis dryly notes, "the ratio of imprecision to measurement value, particularly at (blood lead levels of less than 10 micrograms per deciliter) is relatively high."

Politically, blame is polarized. Progressives have taken aim at Michigan’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder, who they say failed to recognize through his state environmental agency that Flint’s water was unsafe. Meanwhile, some conservatives have targeted the Democratic emergency manager of Flint, who they say was ultimately responsible for switching the city’s water supply to the highly suspect Flint River.

The most controversial culprit, however, is the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Long before the crisis erupted, an EPA employee sounded the alarm about a serious lead problem in Flint’s drinking water system. But his higher-ups declined to make that information public, and instead tried behind the scenes to get the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to take action to solve the problem.

Now, many insist the the EPA should have gone public with what it knew. “With a clear mission to protect human health and the environment, the EPA must be held to the same standard of accountability as state agencies,” the Detroit News wrote in a scathing editorial last week. Indeed, it seemed perplexing that the EPA would sit on troubling information about a potentially poisoned water system in a city of nearly 100,000 people. Why on earth would the EPA do that?

At first, it looked like the reason may have been legal. EPA Region 5 Administrator Dr. Susan Hedman — who has since resigned over her handling of the crisis — said the EPA delayed action because it was “waiting for a legal opinion that wasn’t completed until November 2015.” According to TIME, that opinion contained information about whether the EPA could force the state to act.

An EPA spokesperson told ThinkProgress that no one was available to discuss the legal reasons behind delaying action. But some argue that the so-called “legal opinion” was a distraction — that the EPA could have gone public with information about Flint’s lead contamination while it tried to get Michigan to take action.

“[The legal opinion] really doesn’t have anything to do with why they waited,” Jennifer Chavez, an Earthjustice attorney who works on lead regulation, told ThinkProgress. “I would say there is just a longstanding pattern of minimizing the risks from lead in drinking water at EPA.”

Chavez said the EPA has a history of waiting until it’s too late when it comes to lead, a highly poisonous neurotoxin that can permanently damage children’s brains. She cited the infamous lead contamination of Washington, D.C. in 2001 — EPA officials knew of high levels in 2002, she noted, but it wasn’t until a 2004 Washington Post investigation that the public was fully aware of the problem.

In the case of Flint, Chavez said, the EPA did everything it was required to do under the law. In other words, there is no policy or regulation that required the EPA to tell the public what it knew about the lead in Flint’s drinking water system.

“There was nothing mandatory under the law to alert people,” Chavez said. “It just would have been the right thing to do.”

But while candidates like Trump and Carson have focused blame on the EPA and ignored the role of state officials, Democrats have almost entirely ignored the EPA’s role. Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have both focused their attention solely on Gov. Snyder. Clinton said Snyder acted like “he didn’t really care;” Sanders said he should resign. Neither have mentioned the EPA’s longstanding troubles with reporting lead contamination, the understaffing, or the toxic political environment surrounding the agency.

As Flint’s water remains contaminated, however, environmental health advocates like Keever hope that members of both parties will recognize that there is plenty of blame to go around.

“The politics need to be put aside,” Keever said. “And it doesn’t sound like that’s happening here.”